I don’t understand how one could criticize an approach that looks more generally at how a team played in an effort to better evaluate the quality of said team. An approach that long-term data supports. But what really puzzles me is that Seth criticizes this approach in analytic-types and commends it in coaches.

When analytic-types express something like this, Seth Davis criticizes the idea. But when Brad Stevens’ promotes the idea, he eats it up. Well, Seth doesn’t say that explicitly, but I’m not expecting a column from him critical about the above quote anytime soon. (My conclusion: The idea of chance events influencing the outcome of close games would be more readily accepted from stat-heads if one of us either (a) used a folksy expression like the hay being in the barn, or (b) applied for a coaching job, got it, and eventually became the 15th person in the history of the world to coach in consecutive title games. Any volunteers?)

This “tempo-free” tweak seems to be as much of a response as Davis will offer to the blog post. Wonder if this entire ordeal is going to make things awkward next time Davis runs into SI colleagues Andy Glockner and Luke Winn, who adhere to Ken Pom’s philosophies and almost certainly have his website bookmarked. [Ken Pom]